At any given period in the history of woman, she has adopted man’s whim as the measure of her rights; has claimed nothing; has sweetly accepted any thing: the law of two-and-two itself should be at his discretion. At any given moment, so well was his interpretation received, that it stood for absolute right. In Rome a woman, married or single, could not testify in court; in the middle ages, and down to quite modern times, she could not hold real estate; ten years ago she could not, in New England, obtain a collegiate education; even now she cannot vote.
The first principles of republican government are so rehearsed and re-rehearsed, that one would think they must become “as plain as that two and two make four.” But we find throughout, that, as Emerson said of another class of reasoners, “Their two is not the real two; their four is not the real four.” We find different numerals and diverse arithmetical rules for the two sexes; as, in some Oriental countries, men and women speak different dialects of the same language.
In novels the hero often begins by dreaming, like my friend, of an ideal wife, who shall be ignorant of every thing, and have only brains enough to be bigoted. Instead of sighing, like Falstaff, “Oh for a fine young thief, of the age of two and twenty or thereabouts!” the hero sighs for a fine young idiot of similar age. When the hero is successful in his search and wooing, the novelist sometimes mercifully removes the young woman early, like David Copperfield’s Dora, she bequeathing the bereaved husband, on her death-bed, to a woman of sense. In real life these convenient interruptions do not commonly occur, and the foolish youth regrets through many years that he did not select an Agnes instead.
The acute observer Stendhal says,—
“In Paris, the highest praise for a marriageable girl is to say, ‘She has great sweetness of character and the disposition of a lamb.’ Nothing produces more impression on fools who are looking out for wives. I think I see the interesting couple, two years after, breakfasting together on a dull day, with three tall lackeys waiting upon them!”
And he adds, still speaking in the interest of men,—
“Most men have a period in their career when they might do something great, a period when nothing seems impossible. The ignorance of women spoils for the human race this magnificent opportunity; and love, at the utmost, in these days, only inspires a young man to learn to ride well, or to make a judicious selection of a tailor.”[[6]]
[6]. De L’Amour, par de Stendhal (Henri Beyle). Paris, 1868 [written in 1822], pp. 182, 198.
Society, however, discovers by degrees that there are conveniences in every woman’s knowing the four rules of arithmetic for herself. Two and two come to the same amount on a butcher’s bill, whether the order be given by a man or a woman; and it is the same in all affairs or investments, financial or moral. We shall one day learn that with laws, customs, and public affairs it is even so. Once get it rooted in a woman’s mind, that, for her, two and two make three only, and sooner or later the accounts of the whole human race fail to balance.