Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 | Page 4

persons have been content to leave the
world to go on its old course, in this matter as in others, and have thus
acquiesced in that stern judicial decree, with which Timon of Athens
sums up all his curses upon womankind,--"If there sit twelve women at
the table, let a dozen of them be--as they are."
Ancient or modern, nothing in any of these discussions is so valuable
as the fact of the discussion itself. There is no discussion where there is
no wrong. Nothing so indicates wrong as this morbid self-inspection.
The complaints are a perpetual protest, the defences a perpetual
confession. It is too late to ignore the question, and once opened, it can
be settled only on absolute and permanent principles. There is a wrong;
but where? Does woman already know too much, or too little? Was she
created for man's subject, or his equal? Shall she have the alphabet, or
not?
Ancient mythology, which undertook to explain everything, easily
accounted for the social and political disabilities of woman. Goguet
quotes the story from St. Augustine, who got it from Varro. Cecrops,
building Athens, saw starting from the earth an olive-plant and a
fountain, side by side. The Delphic oracle said, that this indicated a
strife between Minerva and Neptune for the honor of giving a name to

the city, and that the people must decide between them. Cecrops
thereupon assembled the men, and the women also, who then had a
right to vote; and the result was that Minerva carried the election by a
glorious majority of one. Then Attica was overflowed and laid waste;
of course the citizens attributed the calamity to Neptune, and resolved
to punish the women. It was therefore determined that in future they
should not vote, nor should any child bear the name of its mother.
Thus easily did mythology explain all troublesome inconsistencies. But
it is much that it should even have recognized them, at so early an
epoch, as needing explanation. When we ask for a less symbolical
elucidation, it lies within our reach. At least, it is not hard to take the
first steps into the mystery. There are, to be sure, some flowers of
rhetoric in the way. The obstacle to the participation of woman in the
alphabet, or in any other privilege, has been thought by some to be the
fear of impairing her delicacy, or of destroying her domesticity, or of
confounding the distinction between the sexes. We think otherwise.
These have been plausible excuses; they have even been genuine,
though minor, anxieties. But the whole thing, we take it, had always
one simple, intelligible basis,--sheer contempt for the supposed
intellectual inferiority of woman. She was not to be taught, because she
was not worth teaching. The learned Acidalius, aforesaid, was in the
majority. According to Aristotle and the Peripatetics, woman was
_animal occasionatum_, as if a sort of monster and accidental
production. Mediaeval councils, charitably asserting her claims to the
rank of humanity, still pronounced her unfit for instruction. In the
Hindoo dramas, she did not even speak the same language with her
master, but used the dialect of slaves. When, in the sixteenth century,
Françoise de Saintonges wished to establish girls' schools in France,
she was hooted in the streets, and her father called together four doctors,
learned in the law, to decide whether she was not possessed by demons,
to think of educating women,--_pour s'assurer qu'instraire des femmes
n'était pas un oeuvre du démon_.
It was the same with political rights. The foundation of the Salic Law
was not any sentimental anxiety to guard female delicacy and
domesticity; it was, as stated by Froissart, a blunt, hearty contempt:
"The kingdom of France being too noble to be ruled by a woman." And
the same principle was reaffirmed for our own institutions, in rather

softened language, by Theophilus Parsons, in his famous defence of the
rights of Massachusetts men (the "Essex Result," in 1778): "Women,
what age soever they are of, are not considered as having a sufficient
acquired discretion [to exercise the franchise]."
In harmony with this are the various maxims and bon mots of eminent
men, in respect to women. Niebuhr thought he should not have
educated a girl well,--he should have made her know too much. Lessing
said, "The woman who thinks is like the man who puts on rouge,
ridiculous." Voltaire said, "Ideas are like beards; women and young
men have none." And witty Dr. Maginn carries to its extreme the
atrocity: "We like to hear a few words of sense from a woman, as we
do from a parrot, because they are so unexpected." Yet how can we
wonder at these opinions, when the saints have been severer than the
sages? since the pious Fénelon taught that true virgin delicacy