Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 | Page 6

share of training, of
encouragement, of remuneration, and then talk fine nonsense about her
instincts and her intuitions,--say sentimentally, with the Oriental
proverbialist, "Every book of knowledge is implanted by nature in the
heart of woman," and make the compliment a substitute for the
alphabet.
Nothing can be more absurd than to impose entirely distinct standards,
in this respect, on the two sexes, or to expect that woman, any more
than man, will accomplish anything great without due preparation and
adequate stimulus. Mrs. Patten, who navigated her husband's ship from
Cape Horn to California, would have failed in the effort, for all her
heroism, if she had not, unlike most of her sex, been taught to use her
Bowditch. Florence Nightingale, when she heard of the distresses in the
Crimea, did not, as most people imagine, rise up and say, "I am a
woman, ignorant, but intuitive, with very little sense or information, but
exceedingly sublime aspirations; my strength lies in my weakness; I
can do all things without knowing anything about them." Not at all.
During ten years she had been in hard training for precisely such
services,--had visited all the hospitals in London, Edinburgh, Dublin,
Paris, Lyons, Rome, Brussels, and Berlin.--had studied under the
Sisters of Charity, and been twice a nurse in the Protestant Institution at
Kaiserswerth. Therefore she did not merely carry to the Crimea a
woman's heart, as her stock in trade, but she knew the alphabet of her
profession better than the men around her. Of course, genius and
enthusiasm are, for both sexes, elements unforeseen and incalculable;
but, as a general rule, great achievements imply great preparations and

favorable conditions.
To disregard this truth is unreasonable in the abstract and cruel in its
consequences. If an extraordinary male gymnast can clear a height of
ten feet with the aid of a spring-board, it would be considered slightly
absurd to ask a woman to leap eleven feet without one; yet this is
precisely what society and the critics have always done. Training and
wages and social approbation are very elastic spring-boards, and the
whole course of history has seen these offered bounteously to one sex
and as sedulously withheld from the other. Let woman consent to be a
doll, and there was no finery so gorgeous, no baby-house so costly, but
she might aspire to share its lavish delights;--let her ask simply for an
equal chance to learn, to labor, and to live, and it was as if that same
doll should open its lips, and propound Euclid's forty-seventh
proposition. While we have all deplored the helpless position of
indigent women, and lamented that they had no alternative beyond the
needle, the wash-tub, the school-room, and the street, we have yet
resisted their admission into every new occupation, denied them
training, and cut their compensation down. Like Charles Lamb, who
atoned for coming late to the office in the morning by going away early
in the afternoon, we have, first, half educated women, and then, to
restore the balance, only half paid them. What innumerable obstacles
have been placed in the way of female physicians! what a complication
of difficulties has been encountered by female printers, engravers, and
designers! In London, Mr. Bennett was recently mobbed for lecturing
to women on watchmaking. In this country, we have known grave
professors to refuse to address lyceums which thought fit to employ an
occasional female lecturer. Mr. Comer states that it was "in the face of
ridicule and sneers" that he began to educate women as book-keepers,
eight years ago; and it is a little contemptible in the authoress of "A
Woman's Thoughts on Women" to revive the same satire now, when
she must know that in one half the retail shops in Paris her own sex
rules the ledger, and Mammon knows no Salic law.
We find, on investigation, what these considerations would lead us to
expect, that eminent women have commonly been more exceptional in
their training and position than even in their genius. They have excelled
the average of their own sex because they have had more of the
ordinary advantages of the other sex. Take any department of learning

or skill; take, for instance, the knowledge of languages, the universal
alphabet, philology.--On the great stairway, at Padua, stands the statue
of Elena Cornaro, professor of six languages in that once renowned
university. But Elena Cornaro was educated like a boy, by her father.
On the great door of the University of Bologna is inscribed the epitaph
of Clotilda Tambroni, the honored correspondent of Person, and the
first Greek scholar of Southern Europe in her day. But Clotilda
Tambroni was educated like a boy, by Emanuele Aponte.--How fine
are those prefatory words, "by a Right Reverend Prelate," to that
pioneer book in Anglo-Saxon lore, Elizabeth