Thus, which is curious, women are at once the sex which is most constant
and most variable. Most constant from the moral point of view, most
variable from the social. A confraternity in the first case, a hierarchy
in the second. All degrees of culture and all conditions of society are
clearly marked in their outward appearance, their manners and their
tastes; but the inward fraternity is traceable in their feelings, their
instincts, and their desires. The feminine sex represents at the same
time natural and historical inequality; it maintains the unity of the
species and marks off the categories of society, it brings together and
divides, it gathers and separates, it makes castes and breaks through
them, according as it interprets its twofold _role_ in the one sense or
the other. At bottom, woman's mission is essentially conservative, but
she is a conservative without discrimination. On the one side, she
maintains God's work in man, all that is lasting, noble, and truly
human, in the race, poetry, religion, virtue, tenderness. On the other,
she maintains the results of circumstance, all that is passing, local,
and artificial in society; that is to say, customs, absurdities,
prejudices, littlenesses. She surrounds with the same respectful and
tenacious faith the serious and the frivolous, the good and the bad.
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