I

OUGHT WOMEN TO LEARN THE ALPHABET?


Paris smiled, for an hour or two, in the year 1801, when, amidst Napoleon's
mighty projects for remodelling the religion and government of his empire,
the ironical satirist, Sylvain Maréchal, thrust in his "Plan for a Law
prohibiting the Alphabet to Women."[1] Daring, keen, sarcastic, learned,
the little tract retains to-day so much of its pungency, that we can hardly
wonder at the honest simplicity of the author's friend and biographer,
Madame Gacon Dufour, who declared that he must be insane, and soberly
replied to him.

His proposed statute consists of eighty-two clauses, and is fortified by a
"whereas" of a hundred and thirteen weighty reasons. He exhausts the range
of history to show the frightful results which have followed this taste of
fruit of the tree of knowledge; quotes from the Encyclopédie, to prove that
the woman who knows the alphabet has already lost a portion of her
innocence; cites the opinion of 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