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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft: Venables and my mother died the same summer; and, wholly engrossed
by my attention to her, I thought of little else. The neglect of
her darling, my brother Robert, had a violent effect on her weakened
mind; for, though boys may be reckoned the pillars of the house
without doors, girls are often the only comfort within. They but
too frequently waste their health and spirits attending a dying
parent, who leaves them in comparative poverty. After closing,
with filial piety, a father's eyes, they are chased from the paternal
roof, to make room for the first-born, the son, who is to carry
the empty family-name down to posterity; though, occupied with
his own pleasures, he scarcely thought of discharging, in the
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