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 assumes. 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 Abbé 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. All
generations of women having been bred under the shadow of intellectual
contempt, they have, of course, done much to justify it. They have often
used only for frivolous purposes even the poor opportunities allowed them.
They have employed the alphabet, as Molière said, chiefly in spelling the
verb _Amo_. Their use of science has been like that of Mlle. de Launay,
who computed the decline in her lover's affection by his abbreviation of
their evening walk in the public square, preferring to cross it rather
than take the circuit; "from which I inferred," she says, "that his
passion had diminished in the ratio between the diagonal of a rectangular
parallelogram and the sum of two adjacent sides." And their conception,
even of art, has been too often on the scale of Properzia de Rossi, who
carved sixty-five heads on a walnut, the smallest of all recorded symbols
of woman's sphere.

All this might, perhaps, be overcome, if the social prejudice which
discourages women would only reward proportionately those who surmount the
discouragement. The more obstacles, the more glory, if society would only
pay in proportion to the labor; but it does not. Women being denied, not