"Dismiss'd in shame to live
No wiser than their mothers, household stuff,
Live chattels, ***
*** laughing-stocks of Time,"
we may expect soon to see a marked change in the character of the ideal woman as depicted in literature and as desired by the intelligent portion of mankind.
What woman's liberation from intellectual bondage and her freedom to devote herself to scientific pursuits mean for the future of humanity it is difficult at present adequately to forecast. That it will contribute immensely to the betterment of social conditions and to the elevation of the masses of humanity, there can be no doubt. Setting free the imprisoned energies of one half of our race, means more than doubling mankind's capacity for advancement. For the failure to utilize woman's vast energies, pining for an outlet, acted as a drag on man's own potentialities, and thus retarded to an untold extent the world's advancement. In times past, as has aptly been said, "an enormous part of the brain power of mankind has been spent or wasted in smiting the Philistines hip and thigh, and an enormous part of the brain power of womankind has been spent in cajoling Sampson."
It will mean that the women of the future will be more suitable companions for the rapidly increasing number of highly educated men of science; that having their intellects developed pari passu with those of men, they will be able to sympathize with the noblest aims of their husbands and assist them in their most important undertakings, as did the wives of Huber, Lavoisier, Pasteur, Huxley, Louis Agassiz and others scarcely less renowned in the annals of science. It will mean that they will not only share in the joys and the sorrows of their life-companions, but that they will also have a part in their thoughts, their studies, their labors, their achievements. For one should bear in mind that the first essential to a perfect union of hearts is a perfect harmony of minds. Where neither husband nor wife is educated, the virtues may suffice for companionship, but where the man is educated and the woman ignorant, there are sooner or later estrangements and the wife becomes little better than an old Japanese conception of her, "a cook without pay," or a pasha's toy for an idle hour. Chrysalde in Molière's L'École des Femmes, declares:
"Qu'il est assez ennuyeux, que je crois,
D'avoir toute sa vie une bête avec soi."
A briefer and truer statement of the evils of unequal intellectual mating was never penned.[263] Men of intelligence are no longer, like Rousseau, satisfied with an ignorant domestic for a wife, and still less are they disposed with Schopenhauer to regard woman as an incurable Philistine, and as a mere intermediary between a child and a man. They have learned by sad experience that it is contrary both to justice and public policy to impose artificial restrictions on the acquisition of knowledge by women, or to close to the vigorous and capable representatives of their sex careers which are open to the weakest and most incompetent men. History has taught them that the fall of Greece and Rome was owing to the failure of these nations to make due provision for the mental development of women.
And women know that it was because of the inability of the wives of the Athenians to enter into the thoughts of their highly educated husbands and to sympathize with their aims and appreciate their achievements that caused the men to leave them in their solitude and seek in the companionship of the hetæræ the intellectual atmosphere which was wanting in their own homes. They know, too, that the lack of knowledge in the wife and the absence of virtue in the hetæræ, which brought such disasters on the most learned and most cultured of nations are still evils to be guarded against, and that one of the means over and above moral rule and revealed truth of safe-guarding their own interests and preserving the sanctity of the home is to make themselves by knowledge and culture the intellectual equals of their consorts.
They realize also that if they are to attain the highest measure of success as wives and mothers, a broad and thorough education—a knowledge of science, as well as familiarity with art and literature and the teachings of religion—is essential to them for their children's sake. It is said that
"The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world,"
but how much truer is it that "The domestic hearth is the first of schools, and the best of lecture-rooms; for here the heart will coöperate with the mind, the affections with the reasoning power." It is only when the mothers of this, the woman's century, shall dispute with men the primacy of erudition—when they shall prove their mastery of those newer sciences by which our age sets such great store—when they shall possess