Persuasion

...We shall never agree, I suppose, upon this point. No man and woman would, probably. But let me observe that all histories are against you--all stories, prose and verse. ... I could bring you fifty quotations in a moment on my side the argument, and I do not think I ever opened a book in my life which had not something to say upon woman's inconstancy. Songs and proverbs all talk of woman's fickleness. But, perhaps, you will say, these were all written by men.

Jane Austen, Persuasion

As I was reading this past midnight, I thought, Finally--Austen does it here! I can only imagine how confined women like Anne Elliot must have been in Victorian England, in almost anywhere else at that time.We have been constantly persuaded by men, yes, but also by other women, that we are inferior, we do not stand alongside our husbands and brothers and uncles but behind them. As her last book to write before her death, Austen sends out a final message to all those men and women who will be reading this, centuries later, on the persuasion we will have come to flout.