Women and the Alphabet | Page 2

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.
It would seem that the brilliant Frenchman 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 women since China was in its prime, until within the
last half century. 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;" 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 and more: "A man, both day and
night, must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no means
be mistress of her own actions. If the wife have her own free will,
notwithstanding she be of a superior caste, she will behave amiss."
Yet behind these unchanging institutions, a pressure has been for
centuries becoming concentrated, which, now that it has begun to act, is
threatening to overthrow them all. It has not yet operated very visibly
in the Old World, where, even in England, the majority of women have
not till lately mastered the alphabet sufficiently to sign their own names
in the marriage register. But in this country the vast changes of the last
few years are already a matter of history. No trumpet has been sounded,
no earthquake has been felt, while State after State has ushered into
legal existence one half of the population within its borders. Surely,
here and now, might poor M. Maréchal exclaim, the bitter fruits of the
original seed appear. The sad question recurs, Whether women ought
ever to have tasted of the alphabet.
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 epistles 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 was "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