[260] The Subjection of Women, p. 81, London, 1909.
[261] The late Mr. Gladstone asserts that "It would be hard to discover any period of history or country of the world, not being Christian, in which they"—women—"stood so high as with the Greeks of the Heroic Age"—when the position of the Greek woman was so remarkable and "so elevated, both absolutely and in comparison with what it became in the Historic Ages of Greece and Rome amidst their elaborate civilization." Studies on Homer and the Homeric Age, Vol. II, p. 479 et seq., Oxford, 1858. Cf. also the same author's Juventus Mundi, p. 405 et seq., London, 1869.
[262] La Femme de Demain, pp. 45, 46, Paris, 1912.
[263] Dr. Johnson expressed the same sentiment when he declared that a man of sense should meet a suitable companion in a wife. "It was a miserable thing," he asserted in characteristic fashion, "when the conversation could only be such as whether the mutton should be boiled or roasted, and a probable dispute about that."
Sidney Smith, in a forceful and trenchant essay On the Education of Women, written for the Edinburgh Review a century ago, gives it as his deliberate opinion that "The instruction of women improves the stock of natural talents, and employs more minds for the instruction and amusement of the world; it increases the pleasures of society by multiplying the topics upon which the two sexes take a common interest; and makes marriage an intercourse of understanding as well as of affection by giving dignity and importance to the female character. The education of women favors public morals; it provides for every season of life as well as for the brightest and the best; and leaves a woman when she is stricken by the hand of time, not as she now is, destitute of everything and neglected by all, but with the full power and the splendid attractions of knowledge,—diffusing the elegant pleasures of polite literature, and receiving the just homage of learned and accomplished men."
As to the oft repeated commonplace of noodledom that higher education puts an end to domestic economy and deteriorates the noblest qualities of womanhood, the same clear-headed writer asks: "Can anything ... be more perfectly absurd than to suppose that the care and perpetual solicitude which a mother feels for her children, depends upon her ignorance of Greek or mathematics; and that she would desert an infant for a quadratic equation—that Cimmerian ignorance can aid parental affection, or the circle of the arts and sciences produce its destruction—that the moment you suffer women to eat of the tree of knowledge the rest of the family will very soon be reduced to the same kind of aërial and unsatisfactory diet?"
Still more insistent on the necessity of the broadest and deepest education for woman—education in science as well as in art and literature—is the Most Rev. Archbishop, J. L. Spalding, who by his writing and lectures has done so much for the cause of the higher education of both men and women. In an eloquent and pregnant discourse, pronounced in the Church of the Gesù in Rome, in March, 1900, he told his vast audience—composed of the élite of the Eternal City—that:
"If we are to have a race of enlightened, noble, and brave men, we must give to woman the best education it is possible for her to receive. She has the same right as man to become all that she may be, to know whatever may be known, to do whatever is fair and just and good. In souls there is no sex. If we leave half the race in ignorance, how shall we hope to lift the other half into the light of truth and love? Let woman's mental power increase, let her influence grow, and more and more she will stand by the side of man as a helper in all his struggles to make the will of God prevail. From the time the Virgin Mother held the Infant Saviour in her arms, to this hour, woman has been the great lover of Christ and the unweary helper of His little ones; and the more we strengthen and illumine her, the more we add to her sublime faith and devotion the power of knowledge and culture, the more efficaciously shall she work to purify life, to make justice, temperance, chastity, and love prevail. She is more unselfish, more capable of enthusiasm for spiritual ends, she has more sympathy with what is beautiful, noble, and godlike than man; and the more her knowledge increases, the more shall she become a heavenly force to help spread God's kingdom on earth."