FOOTNOTES:
[15] "The World's Olio" (1655) contains an essay on "The Inferiority of Woman, morally and physically".
[16] See Forsyth, Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century, pp. 18-24.
[17] Letter 126.
[18] Letter 298.
[19] Letter 76.
[20] Letter 481.
[21] Letter 78.
[22] Letter 124.
[23] The above statement may at first sight seem rather too sweeping. But it is supported by the authority of Mary Astell (cf. page 90), who in her "Serious Proposal to the Ladies" remarks that it was generally considered quite unnecessary to waste money on the education of daughters. Most parents, she says, "took as much pains to beat girls away from knowledge as to beat boys towards it". She was quite aware that her scheme for the establishment of a nunnery in which the daughters of the aristocracy were to be saved from neglect must be shocking to the parents of her generation, who feared that such an education might in all probability corrupt their morals(!) and would certainly prevent them from marrying. In this lies the gist of all deliberate discouragement of female learning. The only object in a girl's life being to make a suitable match,—meaning a wealthy one,—it followed that everything was subordinated to this consideration. And it unfortunately happened that the men of the century preferred their partners in wedlock silly and ignorant, and consequently easy-going and submissive.