The Instructor 3.11.58

For a dignified bearing comes not from adding what is vulgar but from taking away what is superfluous. Like wing feathers, the women's luxurious possessions must be clipped, since they produce unstable conceit and empty pleasures, by which, lifted up and given wings, they often fly away from their marriages. So women must be restrained decorously and girded with self-controlled modesty, lest they slip away from the truth through conceit. It is good for husbands who trust their wives to entrust the housekeeping to them, as helpers given for this. And if we too, taking part in public life and managing other affairs in the country, often apart from our wives, need to seal something for safety, he gives us too a signet for this purpose only; other rings must be thrown away, since, according to Scripture, “instruction is a golden ornament to the wise.” Women who wear gold seem to me to be afraid that, if one takes away their gold, they will be thought slaves because they are not adorned. But the nobility of truth, examined in what is naturally beautiful in the soul, distinguishes the slave not by sale and purchase but by an unfree mind; and it befits us not to seem free but to be free, instructed by God,