CHAPTER LVI[(43)]
OBJECTIONS TO THE EDUCATION OF WOMEN
(continued)
In France all our ideas about women are got from a twopence-halfpenny catechism. The delightful part of it is that many people, who would not allow the authority of this book to regulate a matter of fifty francs, foolishly follow it word for word in that which bears most nearly on their happiness. Such is the vanity of nineteenth-century ways!
There must be no divorce because marriage is a mystery—and what mystery? The emblem of the union of Jesus Christ with the Church. And what had become of this mystery, if the Church had been given a name of the masculine gender?[1] But let us pass over prejudices already giving way,[2] and let us merely observe this singular spectacle: the root of the tree sapped by the axe of ridicule, but the branches continuing to flower.
Now to return to the observation of facts and their consequences.
In both sexes it is on the manner in which youth has been employed that depends the fate of extreme old age—this is true for women earlier than for men. How is a woman of forty-five received in society? Severely, or more often in a way that is below her dignity. Women are flattered at twenty and abandoned at forty.
A woman of forty-five is of importance only by reason of her children or her lover.
A mother who excels in the fine arts can communicate her talent to her son only in the extremely rare case, where he has received from nature precisely the soul for this talent. But a mother of intellect and culture will give her young son a grasp not only of all merely agreeable talents, but also of all talents that are useful to man in society; and he will be able to make his own choice. The barbarism of the Turks depends in great part on the state of moral degradation among the beautiful Georgians. Two young men born at Paris owe to their mothers the incontestable superiority that they show at sixteen over the young provincials of their age. It is from sixteen to twenty-five that the luck turns.
The men who invented gunpowder, printing, the art of weaving, contribute every day to our happiness, and the same is true of the Montesquieus, the Racines and the La Fontaines. Now the number of geniuses produced by a nation is in proportion to the number of men receiving sufficient culture,[3] and there is nothing to prove to me that my bootmaker has not the soul to write like Corneille. He wants the education necessary to develop his feelings and teach him to communicate them to the public.[4]
Owing to the present system of girls' education, all geniuses who are born women are lost to the public good. So soon as chance gives them the means of displaying themselves, you see them attain to talents the most difficult to acquire. In our own days you see a Catherine II, who had no other education but danger and ...; a Madame Roland; an Alessandra Mari, who raised a regiment in Arezzo and sent it against the French; a Caroline, Queen of Naples, who knew how to put a stop to the contagion of liberalism better than all our Castlereaghs and our Pitts. As for what stands in the way of women's superiority in works of art, see the [chapter on Modesty], article 9. What might Miss Edgeworth not have done, if the circumspection necessary to a young English girl had not forced her at the outset of her career to carry the pulpit into her novel?
What man is there, in love or in marriage, who has the good fortune to be able to communicate his thoughts, just as they occur to him, to the woman with whom he passes his life? He may find a good heart that will share his sorrows, but he is always obliged to turn his thoughts into small change if he wishes to be understood, and it would be ridiculous to expect reasonable counsel from an intellect that has need of such a method in order to seize the facts. The most perfect woman, according to the ideas of present-day education, leaves her partner isolated amid the dangers of life and soon runs the risk of wearying him.