The cultivation of all parts of the moral and intellectual nature is requisite to form the man or woman of healthy and well-balanced character.

Without sympathy or consideration for others, man were a poor, stunted, sordid, selfish being; and without cultivated intelligence, the most beautiful woman were little better than a well-dressed doll.
It used to be a favourite notion about woman, that her weakness and dependency upon others constituted her principal claim to admiration.
"If we were to form an image of dignity in a man," said Sir Richard Steele, "we should give him wisdom and valour, as being essential to the character of manhood.

In like manner, if you describe a right woman in a laudable sense, she should have gentle softness, tender fear, and all those parts of life which distinguish her from the other sex, with some subordination to it, but an inferiority which makes her lovely." Thus, her weakness was to be cultivated, rather than her strength; her folly, rather than her wisdom.

She was to be a weak, fearful, tearful, characterless, inferior creature, with just sense enough to understand the soft nothings addressed to her by the "superior" sex.

She was to be educated as an ornamental appanage of man, rather as an independent intelligence--or as a wife, mother, companion, or friend.
Pope, in one of his 'Moral Essays,' asserts that "most women have no characters at all;" and again he says:-- "Ladies, like variegated tulips, show: 'Tis to their changes half their charms we owe, Fine by defect and delicately weak." This satire characteristically occurs in the poet's 'Epistle to Martha Blount,' the housekeeper who so tyrannically ruled him; and in the same verses he spitefully girds at Lady Mary Wortley Montague, at whose feet he had thrown himself as a lover, and been contemptuously rejected.
But Pope was no judge of women, nor was he even a very wise or tolerant judge of men.
It is still too much the practice to cultivate the weakness of woman rather than her strength, and to render her attractive rather than self-reliant.