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

to females, on any terms, is an institution
but little more than a half-century old in the city of Boston. It is well
established by the early deeds and documents that a large proportion of
Puritan women could not write their own names; and in Boston
especially, for a hundred and fifty years, the public schools included
boys only. In the year 1789, however, the notable discovery was made,
that the average attendance of pupils from April to October was only
one half of that reported for the remainder of the year. This was an
obvious waste of money and accommodations, and it was therefore
proposed that female pupils should be annually introduced during this
intermediate period. Accordingly, school-girls, like other flowers,
blossomed in summer only; and this state of things lasted, with but
slight modification, for some forty years, according to the
School-Superintendent's Third Report. It was not till 1828 that all
distinctions were abolished in the Boston Common Schools; in the
High Schools lingering far later, sole vestige of the "good old times,"
before a mistaken economy overthrew the wholesome doctrine of M.
Sylvain Maréchal, and let loose the alphabet among women.
It is true that Eve ruined us all, according to theology, without knowing

her letters. Still, there is something to be said in defence of that
venerable ancestress. The Veronese lady, Isotta Nogarola, five hundred
and thirty-six of whose learned letters were preserved by De Thou,
composed a dialogue on the question, Whether Adam or Eve had
committed the greater sin? But Ludovico Domenichi, in his "Dialogue
on the Nobleness of Women," maintains that Eve did not sin at all,
because she was not even created when Adam was told not to eat the
apple. It is "in Adam all died," he shrewdly says; nobody died in
Eve;--which looks plausible. Be that as it may, Eve's daughters are in
danger of swallowing a whole harvest of forbidden fruit, in these
revolutionary days, unless something be done to cut off the supply.
It has been seriously asserted that during the last half-century more
books have been written by women and about women than during all
the previous uncounted ages. It may be true; although, when we think
of the innumerable volumes of _Mémoires_ by Frenchwomen of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,--each one justifying the existence
of her own ten volumes by the remark, that all her contemporaries were
writing as many,--we have our doubts. As to the increased multitude of
general treatises on the female sex, however,--its education, life, health,
diseases, charms, dress, deeds, sphere, rights, wrongs, work, wages,
encroachments, and idiosyncrasies generally,--there can be no doubt
whatever; and the poorest of these books recognizes a condition of
public sentiment which no other age ever dreamed of. Still, literary
history preserves the names of some reformers before the Reformation,
in this matter. There was Signora Moderata Fonte, the Venetian, who
left a book to be published after her death, in 1592, "Dei Meriti delle
Donne." There was her townswoman, Lucrezia Marinella, who
followed ten years after, with her essay, "La Nobilità e la Eccelenza
delle Donne, con Difetti e Mancamenti degli Domini,"--a
comprehensive theme, truly! Then followed the all-accomplished Anna
Maria Schurman, in 1645, with her "Dissertatio de Ingenii Muliebris ad
Doctrinam et meliores Literas Aptitudine," with a few miscellaneous
letters appended, in Greek and Hebrew. At last came boldly Jacquette
Guillaume, in 1665, and threw down the gauntlet in her title-page, "Les
Dames Illustres; où par bonnes et fortes Raisons il se prouve que le
Sexe Feminin surpasse en toute Sorte de Genre le Sexe Masculin"; and
with her came Margaret Boufflet and a host of others; and finally, in

England, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose famous book, formidable in its
day, would seem rather conservative now,--and in America, that pious
and worthy dame, Mrs. H. Mather Crocker, Cotton Mather's grandchild,
who, in 1818, published the first book on the "Rights of Woman" ever
written on this side the Atlantic.
Meanwhile there have never been wanting men, and strong men, to
echo these appeals. From Cornelius Agrippa and his essay (1509) on
the excellence of woman and her preëminence over man, down to the
first youthful thesis of Agassiz, "Mens Feminae Viri Animo superior,"
there has been a succession of voices crying in the wilderness. In
England, Anthony Gibson wrote a book, in 1599, called "A Woman's
Woorth, defended against all the Men in the World, proouing them to
be more Perfect, Excellent, and Absolute in all Vertuous Actions than
any Man of what Qualitie soever, _Interlarded with Poetry." Per
contra,_ the learned Acidalius published a book in Latin and afterwards
in French, to prove that women are not reasonable creatures. Modern
theologians are at worst merely sub-acid, and do not always say so, if
they think so. Meanwhile most