serflike

Synopsis: To Alice Coggins, the 24-year-old daughter of a South Philadelphia scam artist, everything looks like a racket: endless serflike internships, student loans that can never be repaid, high-minded charities run by swindlers for the benefit of rich donors.

Without naming Wollstonecraft, he protests her project of demanding equal social treatment between the sexes, which he portends will destroy femininity: "to talk men emphatically and loquaciously out of their notion that women must be maintained, taken care of, protected and indulged like a more delicate, strangely wild, and often pleasant domestic animal; the awkward and indignant search for everything slavelike and serflike that has characterized woman's position in the order of society so far and still does (as if slavery were a counterargument and not instead a condition of every higher culture, every enhancement of culture)--what is the meaning of all this if not a crumbling of feminine instincts, a defeminization?" (Beyond 168-69).

In this they symbolized for Anglo Californians the serflike fate that awaited them too if they failed to act.