"
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 sages? since the pious Fenelon
taught that true virgin delicacy was almost as incompatible with
learning as with vice,--and Dr. Channing complained, in his "Essay on
Exclusion and Denunciation," of "women forgetting the tenderness of
their sex" and arguing on theology.
Now this impression of feminine inferiority may be right or wrong, but
it obviously does a good deal towards explaining the facts it takes for
granted. If contempt does not originally cause failure, it perpetuates
it. Systematically discourage any individual or class, from birth to
death, and they learn, in nine cases out of ten, to acquiesce in their
degradation, if not to claim it as a crown of glory. If the Abbe Choisi
praised the Duchesse de Fontanges for being "beautiful as an angel and
silly as a goose," it was natural that all the young ladies of the court
should resolve to make up in folly what they wanted in charms.
Pages:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25