Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859

Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 16,
February, 1859

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February,
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Title: Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859
Author: Various
Release Date: March 17, 2004 [EBook #11606]
Language: English
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THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
* * * * *
VOL. III--FEBRUARY, 1859.--NO. XVI.
* * * * *

OUGHT WOMEN TO LEARN THE ALPHABET?
Paris smiled, for an hour or two, in the year 1801, when, amidst
Napoleon's mighty projects for remodelling the religion and
government of his empire, the ironical satirist, Sylvain Maréchal, thrust
in his "Plan for a Law prohibiting the Alphabet to Women." Daring,
keen, sarcastic, learned, the little tract retains to-day so much of its
pungency, that we can hardly wonder at the honest simplicity of the
author's friend and biographer, Madame Gaeon Dufour, who declared
that he must be partially insane, and proceeded to prove herself so by
replying to him. His proposed statute consists of eighty-two clauses,
and is fortified by a "whereas" of a hundred and thirteen weighty
reasons. He exhausts the range of history to show the frightful results
which have followed this taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge;
quotes, the Encyclopédie, to prove that the woman who knows the
alphabet has already lost a portion of her innocence; cites the opinion
of Molière, that any female who has unhappily learned anything in this
line should affect ignorance, when possible; asserts that knowledge
rarely makes men attractive, and females never; opines that women
have no occasion to peruse Ovid's "Art of Love," since they know it all
in advance; remarks that three-quarters of female authors are no better
than they should be; maintains that Madame Guion would have been
far more useful, had she been merely pretty and an ignoramus, such as
Nature made her,--that Ruth and Naomi could not read, and Boaz
probably would never have married into the family, had they possessed
that accomplishment,--that the Spartan women did not know the
alphabet, nor the Amazons, nor Penelope, nor Andromache, nor
Lucretia, nor Joan of Arc, nor Petrarch's Laura, nor the daughters of
Charlemagne, nor the three hundred and sixty-five wives of
Mohammed;--but that Sappho and Madame de Maintenon could read
altogether too well, while the case of Saint Brigitta, who brought forth
twelve children and twelve books, was clearly exceptional, and
afforded no safe precedent.
We take it, that the brilliant Frenchman has touched the root of the
matter. Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole question
lies. Concede this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the world
before she has done with it; it becomes merely a question of time.
Resistance must be made here or nowhere. Obsta principiis. Woman

must be a subject or an equal; there is no middle ground. What if the
Chinese proverb should turn out to be, after all, the summit of
wisdom,--"For men, to cultivate virtue is knowledge; for women, to
renounce knowledge is virtue"?
No doubt, the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws
of gravitation generally. Certainly, there has been but little change in
the legal position of woman since China was in its prime, until within
the last dozen years. Lawyers admit that the fundamental theory of
English and Oriental law is the same on this point: Man and wife are
one, and that one is the husband. It is the oldest of legal traditions.
When Blackstone declares that "the very being and existence of the
woman is suspended during the marriage," and American Kent echoes
that "her legal existence and authority are in a manner lost,"--when
Petersdorff asserts that "the husband has the right of imposing such
corporeal restraints as he may deem necessary," and Bacon that "the
husband hath, by law, power and dominion over his wife, and may
keep her by force within the bounds of duty, and may beat her, but not
in a violent or cruel manner,"[A]--when Mr. Justice Coleridge rules that
the husband, in certain cases, "has a right to confine his wife in his own
dwelling-house and restrain her from liberty for an indefinite time," and
Baron Alderson sums it all up tersely, "The wife is only the servant of
her husband,"--these high authorities simply reaffirm the dogma of the
Gentoo code, four thousand years old