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to the participation of women in the alphabet, or in 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.
I doubt it. These 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.
Mediaeval 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, Francoise 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 naetait pas un Oeuvre du demon.
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 ”
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