only on absolute and permanent principles. There is a wrong; but where?
Does woman already know too much, or too little? Was she created for man's
subject, or his 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 Saint 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 inconsistencies; but it
is much that it should even have recognized them as needing explanation.
The real solution is, however, more simple. The obstacle to the woman's
sharing the alphabet, or indeed 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. These may
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