Molière, 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 children and twelve books, was
clearly exceptional, and afforded no safe precedent.

We take it, that the brilliant Frenchman has touched the root of the
matter. Ought women to learn the alphabet? There the whole question
lies. Concede this little fulcrum, and Archimedea will move the world
before she has done with it; it becomes merely a question of time.
Resistance must be made here or nowhere. _Obsta principiis_. Woman must
be a subject or an equal; there is no middle ground. What if the Chinese
proverb should turn out to be, after all, the summit of wisdom,--"For
men, to cultivate virtue is knowledge; for women, to renounce knowledge
is virtue"?

No doubt, the progress of events is slow, like the working of the laws
of gravitation generally. Certainly, there has been but little change in
the legal position of woman since China was in its prime, until within