Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 | Page 5

was
almost as incompatible with learning as with vice,--and Dr. Channing
complained, in his "Essay on Exclusion and Denunciation," of "women
forgetting the tenderness of their sex" and arguing on theology.
Now this impression of feminine inferiority may be right or wrong, but
it obviously does a good deal towards explaining the facts it takes for
granted. If contempt does not originally cause failure, it perpetuates it.
Systematically discourage any individual or class, from birth to death,
and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their
degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory. If the Abbé Choisi
praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being "beautiful as an angel and
silly as a goose," it was natural that all the young ladies of the court
should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms. All
generations of women having been bred under the shadow of
intellectual contempt, they have of course done much to justify it. They
have often used only for frivolous purposes even the poor opportunities
allowed them. They have employed the alphabet, as Molière said,
chiefly in spelling the verb Amo. Their use of science has been like that
of Mlle. de Launay, who computed the decline in her lover's affection
by his abbreviation of their evening walk in the public square,
preferring to cross it rather than take the circuit,--"From which I
inferred," she says, "that his passion had diminished in the ratio
between the diagonal of a rectangular parallelogram and the sum of two
adjacent sides." And their conception, even of Art, has been too often

on the scale of Properzia de Rossi, who carved sixty-five heads on a
walnut, the smallest of all recorded symbols of woman's sphere.
All this might perhaps be overcome, if the social prejudice which
discourages woman would only reward proportionately those who
surmount the discouragement. The more obstacles the more glory, if
society would only pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not.
Women, being denied not merely the antecedent training which
prepares for great deeds, but the subsequent praise and compensation
which follow them, have been weakened in both directions. The career
of eminent men ordinarily begins with colleges and the memories of
Miltiades, and ends with fortune and fame; woman begins under
discouragement, and ends beneath the same. Single, she works with
half-preparation and half-pay; married, she puts name and wages into
the keeping of her husband, shrinks into John Smith's "lady" during life,
and John Smith's "relict" on her tombstone; and still the world wonders
that her deeds, like her opportunities, are inferior.
Evidently, then, the advocates of woman's claims--those who hold that
"the virtues of the man and the woman are the same," with
Antisthenes,--or that "the talent of the man and the woman is the
same," with Socrates in Xenophon's "Banquet"--must be cautious lest
they attempt to prove too much. Of course, if women know as much as
men without schools and colleges, there is no need of admitting them to
these institutions. If they work as well on half-pay, it diminishes the
inducement to give them the other half. The safer position is, to claim
that they have done just enough to show what they might have done
under circumstances less discouraging. Take, for instance, the common
remark, that women have invented nothing. It is a valid answer, that the
only tools habitually needed by woman have been the needle, the
spindle, and the basket, and tradition reports that she herself invented
all three. In the same way it may be shown that the departments in
which women have equalled men have been the departments in which
they have had equal training, equal encouragement, and equal
compensation,--as, for instance, the theatre. Madame Lagrange, the
_prima donna_, after years of costly musical instruction, wins the
zenith of professional success; she receives, the newspapers affirm,
sixty thousand dollars a year, travelling-expenses for ten persons,
country-houses, stables, and liveries, besides an uncounted revenue of

bracelets, bouquets, and _billet-doux_. Of course, every young
_débutante_ fancies the same thing within her own reach, with only a
brief stage-vista between. On the stage there is no deduction for sex,
and therefore woman has shown in that sphere an equal genius. But
every female common-school teacher in the United States finds the
enjoyment of her two hundred dollars a year to be secretly embittered
by the knowledge that the young college-stripling in the next
school-room is paid a thousand dollars for work no harder or more
responsible than her own,--and that, too, after the whole pathway of
education has been obstructed for her and smoothed for him. These
may be gross and carnal considerations; but Faith asks her daily bread,
and Fancy must be fed. We deny woman her fair