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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays 1 1 Browse Search
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Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Atlantic Essays, Ought women to learn the alphabet? (search)
Ought women to learn the alphabet? Paris smiled, for an hour or two, in the year 1801, when, amidst Napoleon's mighty projects for remodelling the religion and government of his empire, the ironical satirist, Sylvain Marechal, thrust in his Plan for a law prohibiting the alphabet to women. Daring, keen, sarcastic, learned, the little tract retains to-day so much of its pungency, that we can hardly wonder at the honest simplicity of the author's friend and biographer, Madame Gacon Dufour, who declared that he must be insane, and proceeded to prove herself so by soberly replying to him. His proposed statute consists of eighty-two clauses, and is fortified by a whereas of a hundred and thirteen weighty reasons. He exhausts the range of history to show the frightful results which have followed this taste of the fruit of the tree of knowledge; quotes the Encyclopedie, to prove that the woman who knows the alphabet has already lost a portion of her innocence; cites the opinion of