Women and the Alphabet | Page 4

The real solution is, however, more simple. The obstacle
to the woman's sharing the alphabet, or indeed 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. These may have been plausible excuses. They have even
been genuine, though minor, anxieties. But the whole thing, I 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. Mediæval 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'instruire 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 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 assumes. 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 women 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 training which prepares for great
deeds, but the praise and compensation which follow them, have been
weakened in both directions. The career of eminent men ordinarily
begins with