Daily Gazette & Comet [Baton Rouge, LA], November 15, 1860
In the last Ledger Fanny Vern thus complains of men, women and things:
I am sick of politics. I am sick of torchlight fizzles. I am sick of “the Prince.” I am sick of men who never talk sense to women.—I am sick of boys of seven smoking cigars. I am sick of gloomy Pharisees, and worthy, idealess sermons, and narrow creeds. I am sick of lawless Sabbatarians, and female infidels, and free-lovers. I am sick of unhealthy, diseased books, full of mystifications and transcendental bosh. I am sick of “chaste ribbons” and “ravishing lace.” I am sick, in an age which produced a Bronte and a Browning, of the prate of men who assert that every woman should be a perfect housekeeper, and fail to add, that every man should be a perfect carpenter. I am as sick of women self-styled “literary,” who think it a proof of genius to despise every day household duties. I am sick of schools for the manufacture of bent spines. I am sick of parents, the coffins of whose children are already being made, asking teachers to add “another branch” to the already suicidal pile of lessons. I am sick of over-worked, ill-paid female operatives. I am sick of seeing tracts distributed where soup and bread should go. I am sick of seeing noodles in high places, and intelligence and refinement sitting in inglorious ease by their own firesides. I am sick of the encouragement held out to women by the other sex to remain pretty idiots, followed by long moral essays upon the enormity of being such. I am sick of flummery and nonsense and humbug and pretension of every kind. I am sick of this everlasting scrabbling and crowding, and punishing and jostling, on the edge of the five feet of earth which is all any one of us can have at last, after all our pains.
Now, don’t lay this growl to indigestion, for I never had it, or billiousness, for I feel as if I were just made, or long arrears of unpaid bills, because I pay as I go. No sir—as the Episcopals have it, “all this I do steadfastly believe.” There—now I feel better.