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Cecrops (search for this): chapter 5
s 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 St. 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 i
Charles Lamb (search for this): chapter 5
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 yet 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 the way of female physicians! what a complication of difficulties has been encountered by female printers, engravers, and designers! In London, Mr. Bennett was recently mobbed for lecturing to women on watchmaking. In this country, we have known grave pr
Niebuhr (search for this): chapter 5
tempt: 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 sa
Eve (search for this): chapter 5
ess. 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 is 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 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 Memoires by French women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,--each justifying the existence of
Elizabeth Elstob (search for this): chapter 5
naro, 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? But 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
Lagrange (search for this): chapter 5
ging. 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 billet-doux. Of course, every young debutante 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, therefo
Mlle (search for this): chapter 5
e, 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 Moliere 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 iEurope (so says Voltaire), sustained the dignity of the throne against Richelieu and Mazarin. And these queens most assuredly did not sacrifice their womanhood in the process; for her Britannic Majesty's wardrobe included four thousand gowns; and Mlle. de Montpensier declares, that when Christina had put on a wig of the latest fashion, she really looked extremely pretty. Les races se feminisent, said Buffon,--The world is growing more feminine. It is a compliment, whether the naturalist in
Buchan (search for this): chapter 5
ll the aliment that history has given to its heroes. Not home less, but humanity more. When the high-born English lady in the Crimean hospital, ordered to a post of almost certain death, only raised her hands to heaven, and said, Thank God! she did not renounce her true position as woman: she claimed it. When the queen of James I. of Scotland, already immortalized by him in stately verse, won a higher immortality by welcoming to her fair bosom the dagger aimed at his; when the Countess of Buchan hung confined in her iron cage, outside Berwick Castle, in penalty for crowning Robert the Bruce; when the stainless soul of Joan of Arc met God, like Moses, in a burning flame,--these things were as they should be. Man must not monopolize these privileges of peril, birthright of great souls. Serenades and compliments must not replace the nobler hospitality which shares with woman the opportunity of martyrdom. Great administrative duties also, cares of state, for which one should be born g
Ruth (search for this): chapter 5
ere, that any female who has unhappily learned anything in this line should affect ignorance, when possible; asserts that knowledge rarely 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 c
Antisthenes (search for this): chapter 5
ortune 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 claimsthose 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 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 l
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