Women and the Alphabet | Page 3

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 French women of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,--each 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 of which no other age ever dreamed.
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 Uomini,"--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 1848, 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, proving 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 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 Saint 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 as needing
explanation.