... a woman always knows enough
If but her range of understanding reaches
To telling one from t'other, coat and breeches.
(Les Femmes Savantes, Act II, Scene VII.)
[Translation of C. H. Page, New York, 1908.]
At Paris, this is the highest praise for a young girl of a marriageable age: "There is so much that's sweet in her character, and she's as gentle as a lamb." Nothing has more effect on the idiots looking out for wives. But see them two years later, lunching tête-à-tête with their wives some dull day, hats on and surrounded by three great lackeys!
We have seen a law carried in the United States, in 1818, which condemns to thirty-four strokes of the cat anyone teaching a Virginian negro to read.[1] Nothing could be more consequent and more reasonable than a law of this kind.
Were the United States of America themselves more useful to the motherland when they were her slaves or since they have become her equals? If the work of a free man is worth two or three times that of a man reduced to slavery, why should not the same be true of that man's thought?
If we dared, we would give girls the education of a slave; and the proof of this is that if they know anything useful, it is against our wish we teach it them.
"But they turn against us the little education which unhappily they get hold of," some husbands might say. No doubt; and Napoleon was also quite right not to give arms to the National Guard; and the reactionaries are also quite right to proscribe the monitorial system[(44)]. Arm a man, and then continue to oppress him, and you will see that he can be so perverse as to turn his arms against you, as soon as he can.
Even if it were permissible to bring girls up like idiots, on Ave Marias and lewd songs, as they did in the convents of 1770, there would still be several little objections:—
1. In the case of the husband's death, they are called upon to manage the young family.
2. As mothers, they give their male children, the young tyrants of the future, their first education, that education which forms the character, and accustoms the soul to seek happiness by this route rather than by that—and the choice is always an accomplished fact by four or five.
3. In spite of all our pride, the advice of the inevitable partner of our whole life has great influence on those domestic affairs on which our happiness depends so particularly; for, in the absence of passion, happiness is based on the absence of small everyday vexations. Not that we would willingly accord this advice the least influence, but she may repeat the same thing to us for twenty years together. Whose is the spirit of such Roman fortitude as to resist the same idea repeated throughout a whole lifetime? The world is full of husbands who let themselves be led, but it is from weakness and not from a feeling for justice and equality. As they yield perforce, the wife is always tempted to abuse her power, and it is sometimes necessary to abuse power in order to keep it.