“I dare say you marvel sometimes at my independent way of walking through the world just as if nature had made me of your sex instead of poor Eve's.”

Letter to Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (11 February 1822) as quoted in Lafayette in Two Worlds (1996), by Lloyd Kramer, p. 158
Context: I dare say you marvel sometimes at my independent way of walking through the world just as if nature had made me of your sex instead of poor Eve's. Trust me, my beloved friend, the mind has no sex but what habit and education give it, and I who was thrown in infancy upon the world like a wreck upon the waters have learned, as well to struggle with the elements as any male child of Adam.