“Oh, nonsense!” he interrupted. “When once a woman sees in me, not a man, not an equal, but a male, and her one anxiety all her life is to attract me⁠—that is, to take possession of me⁠—how can one talk of their rights? Oh, don’t you believe them; they are very, very cunning! We men make a great stir about their emancipation, but they don’t care about their emancipation at all, they only pretend to care about it; they are horribly cunning things, horribly cunning!”

I began to feel sleepy and weary of discussion. I turned over with my face to the wall.

“Yes,” I heard as I fell asleep⁠—“yes, and it’s our education that’s at fault, sir. In our towns, the whole education and bringing up of women in its essence tends to develop her into the human beast⁠—that is, to make her attractive to the male and able to vanquish him. Yes, indeed”⁠—Shamohin sighed⁠—“little girls ought to be taught and brought up with boys, so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained so that she may be able, like a man, to recognise when she’s wrong, or she always thinks she’s in the right. Instil into a little girl from her cradle that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover, but her neighbour, her equal in everything. Train her to think logically, to generalise, and do not assure her that her brain weighs less than a man’s and that therefore she can be indifferent to the sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller size than the grown-up man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in the general struggle for existence.