The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

Nothing is more certain than that the ladies always gain of the men by

keeping their ground, and letting their pretended lovers see they can

resent being slighted, and that they are not afraid of saying No.

They, I observe, insult us mightily with telling us of the number of

women; that the wars, and the sea, and trade, and other incidents have

carried the men so much away, that there is no proportion between the

numbers of the sexes, and therefore the women have the disadvantage;

but I am far from granting that the number of women is so great, or the

number of men so small; but if they will have me tell the truth, the

disadvantage of the women is a terrible scandal upon the men, and it

lies here, and here only; namely, that the age is so wicked, and the

sex so debauched, that, in short, the number of such men as an honest

woman ought to meddle with is small indeed, and it is but here and

there that a man is to be found who is fit for a woman to venture upon.

But the consequence even of that too amounts to no more than this, that

women ought to be the more nice; for how do we know the just character

of the man that makes the offer? To say that the woman should be the

more easy on this occasion, is to say we should be the forwarder to

venture because of the greatness of the danger, which, in my way of

reasoning, is very absurd.

On the contrary, the women have ten thousand times the more reason to

be wary and backward, by how much the hazard of being betrayed is the

greater; and would the ladies consider this, and act the wary part,

they would discover every cheat that offered; for, in short, the lives

of very few men nowadays will bear a character; and if the ladies do

but make a little inquiry, they will soon be able to distinguish the

men and deliver themselves. As for women that do not think their own

safety worth their thought, that, impatient of their perfect state,

resolve, as they call it, to take the first good Christian that comes,

that run into matrimony as a horse rushes into the battle, I can say

nothing to them but this, that they are a sort of ladies that are to be

prayed for among the rest of distempered people, and to me they look

like people that venture their whole estates in a lottery where there

is a hundred thousand blanks to one prize.