The Imagery of Happiness
"What citizen of a free country would listen to any offers of good and skilfull administration, in return for the abdication of freedom? Even if he could believe that good and skilful administration can exist among a people ruled by a will not their own, would not the consciousness of working out their own destiny under their own moral responsibility be a compensation to his feelings for great rudeness and imperfection in the details of public affairs? Let him rest assured that whatever he feels on this point, women feel in a fully equal degree. Whatever has been said or written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the ennobling influence of free government—the nerve and spring which it gives to all the faculties, the larger and higher objects which it presents to the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public spirit, and calmer and broader views of duty, that it engenders, and the generally loftier platform on which it elevates the individual as a moral, spiritual, and social being—is every particle as true of women as of men.”
Happiness cannot be accomplished in the absence of outright self-sufficiency. Individuals whose liberty is constrained are unquestionably inhibited. Freedom is an imperative component for equivalence between males and females; routinely denying women the same freedom that is accorded to men entrenches differences between the genders. Women cannot be definitely content when their self-determination is stifled. Therefore, women’s autonomy and gender parity are linked.
