Women and the Alphabet | Page 6

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 schoolroom, and the street, we have usually 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
their way as female physicians; what a complication of difficulties has

been encountered by them, even as printers, engravers, and designers!
In London, Mr. Bennett was once mobbed for lecturing to women on
watchmaking. In this country, we have known grave professors refuse
to address lyceums which thought fit to employ an occasional female
lecturer. Mr. Comer stated that it was "in the face of ridicule and
sneers" that he began to educate American women as bookkeepers
many years ago; and it was a little contemptible in Miss Muloch to
revive the same satire in "A Woman's Thoughts on Women," when she
must have known that in 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 exceptional in
training and position, as well as in their genius. They have excelled the
average of their own sex because they have shared 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 Porson, 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 Elstob's grammar: "Our earthly
possessions are indeed our patrimony, as derived to us by the industry
of our fathers; but the language in which we speak is our mother tongue,
and who so proper to play the critic in this as the females?" Yet this
particular female obtained the rudiments of her rare education from her
mother, before she was eight years old, in spite of much opposition
from her right reverend guardians. Adelung declares that all modern
philology is founded on the translation of a Russian vocabulary into
two hundred different dialects by Catherine II. But Catherine shared, in
childhood, the instructors of her brother, Prince Frederick, and was
subject to some reproach for learning, though a girl, so much more
rapidly than he did. Christina of Sweden ironically reproved Madame
Dacier for her translation of Callimachus: "Such a pretty girl as you are,

are you not ashamed to be so learned?" But Madame Dacier acquired
Greek by contriving to do her embroidery in the room where her father
was teaching her stupid brother; and her queenly critic had herself
learned to read Thucydides, harder Greek than Callimachus, before she
was fourteen. And so down to our own day, who knows how many
mute, inglorious Minervas may have perished unenlightened, while
Margaret Fuller Ossoli and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were being
educated "like boys."
This expression simply means that they had the most solid training
which the times afforded. Most persons would instantly take alarm at
the very words; that is, they have so little faith in the distinctions which
Nature has established, that they think, if you teach the alphabet, or
anything else, indiscriminately to both sexes, you annul all difference
between them. The common reasoning is thus: "Boys and girls are
acknowledged to be very unlike. Now, boys study Greek and algebra,
medicine and bookkeeping. Therefore girls should not." As if one
should say: "Boys and girls are very unlike. Now, boys eat beef and
potatoes. Therefore, obviously, girls should not."
The analogy between physical and spiritual food is precisely in point.
The simple truth is, that, amid the vast range of human powers and
properties, the