[169] See Lacroix, Science et Lettres au Moyen Age et à l’époque de la Renaissance (2nd Ed.), p. 169, where the author, speaking of the beginning of the fourteenth century, says: “Bien des femmes ne donnaient confiance qu’à des personnes de leur sexe pour des opérations d’une nature délicate.”
[170] See Mary Bateson, Mediæval England, p. 286.
[171] See G. S. Coulson, M.A., A Mediæval Garner, p. 58.
[172] See Emile Faguet, Le Féminisme, p. 173: “Quand on songe que la coûtume de Bretagne et que l’Ordonnance de Blois de 1579 (executive dans tout le Royaume) condamnaient à la peine de mort, les hommes coupables de rapt!” As to the spiritual side of the seventeenth century, on the other hand, we have only to think of Molière’s Précieuses Ridicules and Les Femmes Savantes, each of which plays caricatures the then existing phenomenon of the learned woman.
[173] Faguet, Op. cit.
[174] See Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, p. 41.
[175] Alice Clark, Op. cit., pp. 14-18.
[176] Ibid., Op. cit., p. 25.
[177] Alice Clark, pp. 28-31.
[178] Weininger agrees that it is wholly erroneous to suggest that hitherto women have had no opportunity for the undisturbed development of their mental powers (see Op. cit., p. 72), but, as usual, the support of his contention is feeble and unconvincing.