Women and the Alphabet | Page 5

college 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 the men,
without schools and colleges, there is no need of admitting them to

those 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 implements habitually used 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 _billets-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 four hundred dollars a year to be secretly embittered
by the knowledge that the young college stripling in the next
schoolroom is paid twice that sum 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 share of training, of
encouragement, of remuneration, and then talk fine nonsense about her
instincts and intuitions. We 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's "Navigator." 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 and
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 springboard, 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 springboards; and the whole course of
history has seen these offered bounteously to one